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Sunday, July 27, 2014

A while ago I decided that the thing I like doing the most, most, most is coding. Yes, there are truthiness issues here, but let's not ruin a good start.

That does not mean, however happiness all the time 24/7. And yesterday was one of those times when the process became loathsome. It started with a equal sign in the wrong place, but not so wrong that it caused a message in the console. So: Look. Not find. Look. Not Find. Repeat. Repeat.

Then I wanted to add some sparkle to the project. A good way to add sparkle is to have a light that follows the camera.

The code in Three.js is easy:

var pointLight = new THREE.PointLight( 0xffffff, 0.5 );pointLight.position = camera.position;camera.add( light );The trick is that you also must add the following:scene.add( camera );Normally you don't need to add the camera because scene adds the camera by itself, but in this instance it's necessary to do so because you need to inform the scene that the camera has a new passenger.Again: Talk to light. It not budge. Plead with camera. It not budge. Finally found the answer on one of West Langley's posts on StackOverflow. And, of course, that brings back all the memories of all the previous times I have confronted the un-budging light. So even worse then the problem was the feeling of having been such a dummie again.
The darkest moments, however, were brought on by the code itself. One issue about being a cowboy coder, is that you you can code yourself way out into the wilderness and then have trouble getting back.

One of the amazing things about Three.js is that it allows you to embed a scene, withing a scene, within a scene. It's like the Russian dolls that fit inside one another. In Three.js, however, the scenes can all be visible at once and everything co-mingled on stage all at once.

It's easy to do. All you need to say is:

scene1.add( scene2 );

This worked a treat in helping get the vA3C code up and running for the AEC Hackathon, but really started causing problems as in: "Hello, Object, What scene are you in?" "Duh, I dunno" is the usual reply.

Anyway, a lot of the file opening code has been cleaned up - and the Russian dolls have morphed into one doll. You can now open files from the web using links & Ajax or from local your local hard disk using your OS' File Open dialog. Hats off to Mr.doob for loader.js in the Three.js editor.

The only newish feature is that attributes are back in in a rudimentary fashion. When you click on any item that has userData, the attributes appear in the top right corner - as you can see in the image of Jeremy Tammik's Revit House Project above.

***

On a completely different note I am intrigued by Lawrence Kesteloot's post on Norris Numbers - which starts of with this quote:

My friend Clift Norris has identified a fundamental constant that I call Norris’ number, the average amount of code an untrained programmer can write before he or she hits a wall. Clift estimates this as 1,500 lines. Beyond that the code becomes so tangled that the author cannot debug or modify it without herculean effort.

The gist of the post is that the longer the program the greater the level of skills required to write the program. He closes by wondering aloud if he could achieve a two million line program. (Linux is currently around 15 million lines.) The implication is that it takes smart and clever people to write large programs while smaller programs can be written by less smart people,

Of course, I have full admiration for a person who has written several programs in the 100,000 to 200,000 line range. But on the other hand, I have just as much admiration - and perhaps more - for the programmer who makes magic happen in a 100 lines of code or 10 lines of code.

Similarly, the way I code as a designer differs greatly from the way a programmer codes. (For example, as a risk-taker, I deliberately leave out quotation marks in places most programmers add them.)

The importance is not the length or the shortness of the code, nor is it in the robustness or riskiness of the code but the true benefit derives from the diverse spirits and skills of the people writing the code and their desire and capabilities to share their code - and fully respect each other gifts and talents.

Friday, July 25, 2014

The glorious thing about a computer is that it enables you to process data, save that data, and then - later and elsewhere - open that data for re-processing. This saving and opening thing - being such a sacred holy grail of computing - is normally programmed by the very high-priests in the various cults of data-crunchers. Moving that array of pixels on your screen down to very tiny magnetic blips onto the platter that's spinning very fast and from there to a server-farm in, say, Brea, California and from there to an array of pixels on your friend's screen in Poznan, Poland is not self-evident. It's a job best left to people with PhDs, distinguished resumes and first class brain cells.

The vA3C Viewer app that's being worked on is for viewing data files. So saving is not really a thing that viewers need to do. Unfortunately, the ability to move things about and change materials started creeping into the viewer. So now there are different states: Do you want to see that pretty pony in blue? Or in pink?

AlgeSurf PE - Jurgen Meier Equations

Thus a way of registering those states for reuse would be nice. The previous release of the viewer has the ability to create permalinks - text added onto the end of a URL. In turn these were hand--massaged into text files that restores selected states.

The plan was and still is to automate that process for R3. The idea is to provide a 'save' button that would collect all the links to all the models in the display along with their position, rotation and scale and save these into a script file that you can load that recreates what you had on your display when you saved.

vA3C Revit - Three.js Examples

This is a simple and light weight method and very doable. It is not the same thing as going through every item of geometry, finding every face, vertex and the associated materials and shuffling these all into a tidy bundle on your hard disk. This latter activity is for the pros. The former is OK for script kiddies such as your vA3C Viewer team.

Well, upon the morning that had been appropriated to the permalink coding task, it was decided that reviewing Mr.doob's Three.js Editor would be a good thing.

The Editor does *not* have a save feature. It does, however, have a command that reads the data in memory and sends that data as text to a new window where you can review the data.

vA3C Grasshopper - Three.js Examples

And, then, it turns out the HTML5 has the new ability to enable you to save text that's in a window to a file on your hard disk.

Somehow these two thoughts became co-mingled. Code was copied, pasted and cobbled together. A 'Save' button was added to the vA3C Viewer.

FGx Aircraft - Three.js Examples - AlgeSurf PE Jurgen Meier Equations

And then, the Save button was clicked.

The mental lollipops nearly fell on the floor.

It worked.

vA3C Viewer R3 is now enabled to take all the data that is in the display and write it out to a brand new JSON file. And these files, in turn can be used to create further JSON files.

Of course, it's not perfect. Files with shaders and other exotics don't work. Somethings come in and can be edited and others can't. But many fun things do work.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

One of the many joys of JavaScript is its very close-binding to the HTML Document Object Model (DOM.), This enables little people like me to blast out code that is way above their given brain-grade. With very little training, you can quite quickly and easily see what is causing this hiccough or gripe in this code snippet you are cobbling together.The JavaScript console is your friend. Type in the word 'window' or 'document' and a dot or period, click on the pop-up menu items, repeat.

It's a reverse Hansel and Gretel. The dots are like little stones you follow. But instead of taking you home they encourage you to visit new worlds you never knew existed. Yes, debuggers in other languages have similar sorts of capabilities - but since they are not as closely linked to the DOM they mostly good at showing you the garbage you have created and not as good with curated, fun stuff that's out there.

But this is not a language comparison diatribe. This post about accessing 3D models in deep DOM-like fashion.

I have been looking at Mr.doob's 200+ Three.js coding examples for four years. Their display output and their lines of code are becoming etched in my mind. They become fixed pillars as I look back on my development process.

Until yesterday.

Mr.doob's lines of code - and any other code - is as mutable, as real-timable, as DOM-able, as fresh as we want it to be.

So I am bringing in Lucy into Voxel Painter and making her mesh reflect the square in the city of Pisa. I have put Suzanne in the NURBs demo and the Witch of Agnesi cylinder equation in the canvas birds demo.

For sure, I could do this in a CAD program: insert a 'block' into a drawing etc. The difference is that I am not just using the program. I am creating/editing/playing with the program itself at the same time as I use it.

It no longer takes teams of really smart compter science wizards many weeks to add a new feature. You can now bring in all that 3D data into the DOM. You can use the JavaScript Console to guide you into inventing new tricks for that data. And you can do this before breakfast

Sunday, July 20, 2014

The preview in today's post looks a lot like the preview in yesterday's post. But there is a huge difference. Or a tiny difference - depending on your point of view.

The issue is this: The Internet is about nice people sharing data - in a free and unencumbered manner - and about naughty people manipulating data in peculiar ways. And, yes there are other types of peeps as well.

In the early days of the Internet, everybody was nice and it was fun and easy to share. Nowadays it's different. Of note here, are the increasing restrictions on cross origin resource sharing and the increasing demand for a same origin policy. And, yes, apps on servers can bypass many of these restrictions.

The result is that most of the larger resource where you can keep things for free - such as Flickr, Imgur, DropBox, GitHub and many others disable cross origin resource sharing. This means that JavaScript apps running in your browser are stuck with obtaining data from one source at a time. And, yes, there are exceptions.

Thus the situation for a CAD file viewer such as the vA3C viewer has been fairly marginal. The only drawing the app could open were drawings from the same domain it was launched from.

Until today.

The new - still quite broken - R3 of the vAEC Viewer loads the file we built for it at the AEC Hackathon. And it also loads every example file and every 3D model from Mr.doob's Three.js example folders. And it is loading and displaying the 170+ HTML files of math equations from Jaanga Alegesurf.

Not only is the app loading the files but it's also enabling you to mash-up the data from the three sources any way you want. And, yes, it's doing this real-time sharing in a time-honored, secure manner.

What's the trick?

It's easy peasy. Fork the repo on the GitHub server. No need to download a single byte to a local machine. Publish the repo to the GitHub gh-pages branch. Presto now all of its data is available to apps running from your GitHub presence.

What happens when upstream changes? The official method is to create a pull request and merge. But that is bothersome to the upstream party. It's much easier to simply delete your fork and then re-fork.

Oh, but then - as GitHub warns - it can take quite a while for the pages to start appearing. Not to worry. Open for editing any file in the new fork, make any change, save. Presto! Your new gh-pages files appear instantly.

So this is a huge difference in terms of sharing. But what does this mean for GitHub? The GitHub peeps don't really want to go around replicating half-gig repos all over the place. And they don't have to. They use Git after all. A popular repo has many thousands of forks. So for GitHub your new fork - which they set up in a few seconds - is just a few new pointers and diffs. No big deal.

But for you and me this could be a nice big deal. Currently the site links to something like four hundred files. The current goal is to deliver access to, say, a thousand files of at least somewhat meaningful content.

The traditional on-line CAD viewer is closed-sourced, upload to a walled garden, do-what-they-allow-you-to-do place. Perhaps the time has come for an open-source, freely shared, highly programmable computer aided design enhancer.

The current rev is very incomplete and has many broken bits. It does, however, allow you to place Walt Disney's head inside a warped triaxial hexatorus textured with an image of a '53 Cadillac. Welcome to the Matrix.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Visible only in HTML view here: http://jaanga.github.io/algesurf/parametric-equations/r2/breather-surface/breather-surface.html The Breather Surface. Use your pointing device to pan rotate and zoom

Some of of best friends are mathematicians. This does not mean I necessarily like what they do. On the contrary, I find the Euler-derived notation difficult to parse, not easy to remember and not really pretty to look at.
And then, say you have equations printed on a piece of paper or even displayed in Wikipedia - such as the Frobenius Endomorphism. Now tap or swipe the equation with your fingers. Nothing happens! People spend hours formatting text that just so it ends up sitting still like this. How lame is that?

Thank goodness there are alternatives. One of may favorites is computerese. Just translate the equation into Java or Python or JavaScript and now the number of people that can read what is going on increases from thousands to millions.

And another really nice way of displaying math is via the computer display. The display above is generated by the latest update to AlgeSurf - called AlgeSurf PE. PE stands for parametric equations.

This new display technique represents a major shift in direction from the previously released AlgeSurf Marching Cubes Builder and Player, Both the the Marching Cubes and the Parametric equations apps serve the same purpose: to provide access a extensive libraries of well-known equations and allow you to display, edit and enhance these in 3D.

The Marching Cubes app enables you to do this by accepting and parsing text you enter into an input box - and the text being as close as possible to the standard mathematicians way of writing things. A lot of time and coding went into this effort - with the emphasis being on hiding the code from your view as much as possible.

In other word, the Marching Cube app aids and abets you trying to behave like an old-timey mathematician.

The Parametric Equations app, however, is all about *coding* math. There are 170+ equations - all derived from Jurgen Meier's wonderful web site full of math tutorials written in Java. Each equation is presented as a stand alone HTML file. The files are about 75 lines short and contain everything need to load and view the equation in real-time 3D.

You are very much encouraged to open up any of the files, change the equation and see what happens. It's a fast, fun and easy way to get going with exploring.

The thing is that math can hard and complex and very time-consuming as well. For this you have the Equation Browser. This app reads the the HTML files and adds many features to the display of the equations. Features include the following:

Reads, parses and displays remote Three.js HTML files

Support real-time 3D pan, rotate and zoom

Adds access and editing to full complement of materials, reflections, lights, shade and shadows

Update geometry parameters in real-time

Display wireframe, face & vertex normals

Select background colors or gradients

And the list of future wish list enhancements is even longer.

And as important as the new features might be for helping progress math and math apps, there is perhaps an even more important aspect. JavaScript and Three.js are not APIs or apps but they are languages - coming out of infancy and into broad application. Both the Marching Cubes and Parametric Equations routines are demonstrations that these tools can have highly diverse and profound mathematical application. And when you click them, stuff happens.